Current Weather Conditions

Community Calendar Sponsored By...

ALEXANDRIA CAROLAN

Emporia News needs your help...

Do you read Emporia News every day? Have you ever considered supporting this community based news service with a donation? You may also make a recurring donation with a subscription.

Emporia News needs your help because it is time to replace a laptop and a camera, so that I may continue to bring you a quality site. It troubles me to ask for donations, but without support, Emporia News may be forced to shut down. Thank You.

The Confederate statue in Leesburg, Virginia, does not represent a certain Confederate figure, but rather a generic Confederate soldier. (Capital News Service photo).

By ALEXANDRIA CAROLAN, Capital News Service

LEESBURG, Virginia -- Gertrude Evans, 70, was born into the Jim Crow South and lived through the rocky integration of Leesburg when firemen filled a swimming pool with cement and garbage rather than permit its integration.

More than a half-century later, she turned to art as therapy to work through that traumatic period when she wasn’t allowed to sit on the red stools at Little John’s drugstore or watch a movie at the neighborhood Tally Ho theater.

The white nationalist rally in Charlottesville last year brought “everything to the surface,” she told Capital News Service recently. “… I mean you see (racism), you see it.”

For the first time, she said, she’s been thinking too about the Confederate statue in front of the Leesburg courthouse. She doesn’t believe it should be moved but, still, “it’s the first thing you see” downtown.

“It causes conversation — good.” But “take it down and put it in Ball’s Bluff (Battlefield), you’ll never see it again,” she said. History will be forgotten.

Leesburg’s statue, like so many others around the country, became the subject of renewed concern following the 2015 murder of nine black church members by a white supremacist who posed on social media with a Confederate flag. One member of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors has recommended the statue be moved to Ball’s Bluff Battlefield two and a half miles away where the Confederacy defeated the Union.

Virginia law prevents the county from moving or relocating the monument. In September 2017, the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors decided not to ask the state for authority to move the statue, but it asked the county’s heritage commission to make recommendations this summer regarding the statue and its surroundings.

Capital News Service recently interviewed community members in Leesburg as part of a series exploring the views of African-American and white residents in five southern cities where Confederate statues stand on public land in front of courthouses.

Teams of reporters traveled to Anderson, South Carolina; Easton, Maryland; Elizabeth City, North Carolina; Franklin, Tennessee; and Leesburg, Virginia. They also interviewed leaders of the Maryland Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Most residents, black and white, were wary of taking dramatic steps, such as removing the statues, that would inflame tensions within their communities and could make it more difficult for future generations to understand the Civil War and segregationist Jim Crow eras. Most residents also said they preferred adding more context to Civil War memorials than removing them all together.

Derek Summers Jr., 36, and the founder of Loudoun County’s Citizens’ Committee against Domestic Violence, said he feels the Confederate statue’s gun pointing at him when he drives or walks past it on North King Street nearly every day.

“It’s like letting you know that in the hearts and mind of some of these folk here, the fight’s not over,” said Summers, seated on a bench next to the statue.

David Dixon, 59, owner of Jackson’s Barber Shop a few blocks down the road, has passed the statue on his commute to Leesburg for 24 years. He said the monument doesn’t bother him.

“My personality and the way I am, I really don’t care,” he said. “ … I look more toward the future than the past.”

Marquez Mitchell has passed the Leesburg statue when he visits Jackson’s for a haircut every few weeks. Confederate monuments “represent hatred and slavery, even though on paper they said we were free,” the Harpers Ferry resident said.

As a child, 41-year-old Chris Johnson would go to concerts near the courtyard of the statue. Johnson, a lifelong Leesburg resident, said the statue doesn’t bother him, but “what it stands for” does.

“They don’t need to destroy it necessarily, because there are people who find value in it. But I think for the greater good it is something that should be moved,” Johnson said.

Jim Roberts who leads a walking tour to commemorate African-American history here, leaves the statue off his itinerary. As a child, Roberts played near the statue and never paid much attention to it. He believes the newcomers are offended by it, not so much the old-timers.

“I can’t waste time thinking about what happened 150 years ago because it’s over and done with,” he said.

Horace Nelson Lassiter, 84, a barber at Robinson’s Barber shop which opened in 1962 said the statue “doesn’t bother me. I don’t care what is already done,” he said.

Lassiter was one of the first black police officers in the Loudoun County Deputy Sheriff’s Department in the 1960’s, and took the position “to show black people that they could get a job.”

“There’s still racism (in Leesburg). It hasn’t changed ... It’s not the younger people, it’s the older people in my age group,” Lassiter said.

Lassiter’s wife, Mary Louise Lassiter, 81, a prominent activist in Loudoun County and former local NAACP chapter president wants the statue to stay and for visitors to understand the pain slaves went through on courthouse grounds.

“When they’re told, hopefully they’ll understand the torture of all of those people who were put in those stocks.”

Formerly A Slave Market, Now a Favorite Lunch Spot

The square where the statue sits operated as a slave market throughout of the Civil War. Today the statue is surrounded by restaurants, coffee shops, a bar and the original courthouse. Government employees often lunch feet away from where whipping posts, cages and auction blocks once stood.

While the slave auctions in Leesburg were much smaller than those in other Virginia towns, the courthouse was the epicenter of the city’s slavery institution. In 1856, the court ordered that whippings move off courthouse property, according to newspaper advertisements at the time.

Three lynchings of black men accused of crimes also took place in Leesburg, in 1880, 1889 and 1902, according to the “Lynching in Virginia” history project at George Mason University.

Six years later, in 1908, the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s Leesburg chapter paid to have the statue erected to commemorate soldiers who had died in the war. Like most

Confederate statues across the South, the Leesburg statue’s unveiling came during “a terrible period of disenfranchisement — the Jim Crow period where enforced segregation and disenfranchisement really started to bleed,” said Jim Hall, author of the “Last Lynching in Northern Virginia.”

The president of the Leesburg chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy declined to comment, but the national organization has said it does not support racism, white supremacy or the white nationalists who rallied in Charlottesville, and that it opposes their use of Confederate symbols. Many of its members say the Civil War was not about preserving slavery, a view historians dispute.

“The statues that celebrate the Confederacy were put up when African-Americans were demanding to be treated like human beings,” Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chair said Phyllis Randall, the only member of the board to vote in favor of asking the state for authority over the statue.

Known as "Loudoun's silent sentinel," the bronze figure built by famed sculptor Frederick William Sievers is a soldier with his gun cocked and his eyes fixed forward. It stands higher than both the Korean War monument to the right of the courthouse entrance and the Revolutionary War monument to the left.

In 2005, the local United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter organized the cleaning and rededication of the statue.

It was cleaned with ground up walnut shells to help dissolve the mint green oxidation covering it.

Statue Oversees Businesses District

The generic soldier has an unobstructed view of the Downtown Saloon, a biker bar established in the 1960’s and decorated in bras and Confederate symbols. The menus have images of the courthouse and statue on them. The bar sells T-shirts with art of the statue. Sometimes, motorcycle riding members of the Mechanized Cavalry of the Sons of Confederate Veterans visit and park outside.

A sticker on the mirror behind the bar says “Dixie Rider,” overlayed on top of a Confederate flag.

Scott Warner, in a black T-shirt with a Confederate flag on the left pocket, said of the statue: “Any soldier who dies for what he believes in needs to be honored.” The statue’s fate has “become a political issue and it shouldn’t be,” he said. “It’s our history.”

Not many people paid attention to the statue “until Charlottesville,” said 46-year-old Jim Boyce, seated in the restaurant. “You can’t get rid of everything,” he said. “If you get rid of everything, the history isn’t here.”

Margaret Brown, a member of the Black History Committee at the local Thomas Balch Library, protested against the statue last summer after the march in Charlottesville. She said the biker bar was an intimidating presence for protestors.

“There were some guys who were across the bar who were pretty aggressive with their motorcycles,” revving the engines and glaring at the protestors, she said.

Phillip Thompson, president of the Loudoun County NAACP, said the statue shouldn’t be located in a place for justice. “The courthouse is a seat of power and people were trying to send a message to black citizens,” he said.

Pastor Michelle Thomas, a member of the nine-person commission assessing the future of the statue, said the statue “has the microphone — of hate and oppression and fear.”

Evans, though, has mixed feelings. The statue controversy has made her want to know more about the Civil War era.

“I know my ancestors were enslaved. But I don’t know how they were treated,” she said. “It just makes me think and wonder … I’m very interested in that whole era.”

The Emporia Police Department has changed several of its telephone numbers. Please use the numbers below to replace any numbers you are currently using. Even though some older numbers may still be working now, they will eventually be removed.

911 Communications Center Non-Emergency number:

434-634-7320

Emporia Police Administrative Offices:

434-634-2121

As always, please use 911 for all emergency calls.

Community Calendar

For details, click on the title of an event.

If you use Google Calendar, click the +Google Calendar button to subscribe to this calendar.

Emporia News is a Community Service provided by these Sponsors:

Peggy is celebrating 52 years in the insurance business and Staff over 28 years of experience, combined 78 years of insurance knowledge serving the community. We value our customers and customer service is our #1 priority.

A Veterans Service Representative with the Virginia Department of Veterans Services is now available to assist veterans and their dependents with filing for all federal VA benefits to which they may be entitled. The office is located in the VA Community Based Outpatient Clinic, 1746 E. Atlantic St., RM 103, Emporia, VA. Office hours are Monday – Friday, 8:30 AM to 3:00 PM daily. Walk-in and appointments are available. For more information please call 434-829-6386 or visit their website at www.dvs.virginia.gov.

Regular meetings are held at the

Richardson Memorial Library

at 7pm on the First Wednesday of each month.

Donations and artifacts gladly accepted.

Please call (434)634-1219 for more information.

The Community Youth Center, Ltd. will sponsor a Free Gospel Concert Fundraising on June 15, 2019 at 3 PM. The location is Royal Baptist Church, 106 W. Atlantic Street, Emporia. Please support this event to sponsor our youth so that they will be able to swim this summer at the CYC, Ltd. pool located at 800 Halifax Street, Emporia. We will showcase local talent from our area. Light refreshments will follow.

Search form

Search

Emporia News

Stories on Emporianews.com are be searchable, using the box above. All new stories will be tagged with the date (format YYYY-M-D or 2013-1-1) and the names of persons, places, institutions, etc. mentioned in the article. This database feature will make it easier for those people wishing to find and re-read an article. For anyone wishing to view previous day's pages, you may click on the "Previous Day's Pages" link in the menu at the top of the page, or search by date (YYYY-M-D format) using the box above.

Comment Policy: When an article or poll is open for comments feel free to leave one. Please remember to be respectful when you comment (no foul or hateful language, no racial slurs, etc) and keep our comments safe for work and children. Comments are moderated and comments that contain explicit or hateful words will be deleted. IP addresses are tracked for comments.

EmporiaNews.com serves Emporia and Greensville County, Virginia and the surrounding area

and is provided as a community service by the Advertisers and Sponsors.

All material on EmporiaNews.com is copyright 2005-2019

EmporiaNews.com is powered by Drupal and based on the ThemeBrainSirate Theme.

Submit Your Story!

Emporia News welcomes your submissions! You may submit articles, announcements, school or sports information using thesubmission forms found here, or via e-mail on news@emporianews.com.Currently, photos and advertisements will still be accepted only via e-mail, but if you have photos to go along with your submission, you will receive instructions via e-mail. If you have events to be listed on the Community Calendar, submit them here.

EmporiaNews.com is hosted as a community Service by Telpage. Visit their website at www.telpage.net or call (434)634-5100 (NOTICE: Telpage cannot help you with questions about Emporia New nor does Teplage have any input the content of Emporia News. Please use the e-mail address above if you have any questions, comments or concerns about the content on Emporia News.)